The steps of preparing for the old computer challenge.
Acquiring and preparing a mid-2007 white unibody Macbook model A1181. I acquired it locally, without a battery, SSD, or charging cable. It was also missing the SSD caddy which I didn't realize until later, and I ended up needing to order one off of eBay. I got the battery and charger off Amazon, and they work, which is all I really needed. I also discovered an SSD I had lying around was broken, so I had to figure out another way to install the OS.
This all took about 3 days. I was already out of state by the time I realized I didn't have the caddy, and I assumed the electronics recycling place didn't have one either, though I didn't ask because I was out of town... but by the time I end up back home the one I ordered on ebay will arrive in Philly :^)
I had brought a 512gb thumb drive with me on my trip, along with the macbook, so it worked out. I borrowed another drive from tekk and used my real life job work laptop to download and extract what I needed (it's the installESD.dmg file) and managed to get it to boot from a thumb drive that I just need to leave plugged in whenever I'm using it. Which is fine until I actually get an SSD (and I'm gonna pick one up during OCC for $45 off facebook marketplace as god intended)
The whole process above, once again, took 3 days, both because I was busy doing stuff but also because I couldn't even decide what OS I wanted to run and I still thought the SSD I had lying around would work. But I ended up on 10.7.5 (Lion) which came with its own issues. So I turned my windows laptop into an ftp server so I could transfer Xcode and Pale Moon (which runs on this OS natively!!) and actually access the internet. Not that I really need to access the internet,it just makes certain things more convenient.
I'm using catgirl for my irc client (downloaded with macports) and vim to write the websites, and uploading to sourcehut pages for hosting with my custom domain.
selkie 07/04/2026